Digia has announced the launch of Qt 5.0, a major new version of the popular cross-platform application and user interface development framework for desktop, embedded and mobile applications. Qt 5 delivers a step function increase in performance, functionality and ease of use and will be the platform on which full Android and iOS support will be delivered during the coming year.

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Key benefits of Qt 5 include: graphics quality; performance on constrained hardware; cross-platform portability; support for C++11; HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2; a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs; ease of use and compatibility with Qt 4 versions.

Digia promises that most – which means, notably, not all – applications that were compatible with Qt 4.x will work smoothly, barring perhaps just a few modifications and a simple recompile, on Qt 5. Qt Widgets are also fully supported, the company adds.

As for what comes next:

“There are a few things we’re still working on for the 5.0 series. We have bugs that we want to fix. We currently do not have binary packages for MinGW (as WebKit doesn’t yet work with it yet) and MSVC 2012 (you’ll need to compile from source), and we’ll work on delivering these as soon as possible.

The current plan is to have a first patch level release, 5.0.1, some time before the end of January.”

Finally, Digia points out that no less than 427 people contributed changes to the code base.

The framework is used by the likes of Skype, the European Space Agency, DreamWorks, Google, HP, Lucasfilm, Samsung and Research In Motion. Overall, Digia claims 450,000 developers worldwide use Qt.

It is available under GPL v3, LGPL v2 and a commercial license (for which there is a 30-day free trial available).